Landlocked, dirt poor and devastated by civil war, Sudan has never been a priority in Washington. When George W. Bush became president, it was widely assumed that the country’s woes would count for less than ever. Bush had pilloried Bill Clinton for squandering American resources in remote lands with no clear relevance to U.S. vital interests. Nina Shea of Freedom House, a Washington-based human-rights group, describes Sudan as “the perfect example of a situation that candidate Bush indicated the United States would not become involved in.”
Suddenly, though, Sudan has become a rallying point for some of the most influential Republicans in Congress, as well as senior Bush aides. The driving force is an unusual alliance of conservative Christians, social activists and veteran human-rights champions like Wolf, now coupled with the Congressional Black Caucus. Their coalition spans the American political, religious and racial spectrum and includes evangelist Billy Graham’s son, Franklin, whose evangelical group operates a hospital in southern Sudan. Graham’s people say the Khartoum government’s planes have attacked their hospital seven times but have never succeeded in hitting it.
There’s no shortage of evils in Sudan. The Muslim government’s alleged persecution of southern Christians is the key issue for many of the rebels’ fiercest U.S. supporters. For prominent African-Americans like Coretta Scott King, the hot button is Khartoum’s toleration of slavery and the use of slave-raiding privateers as paramilitary forces in the war against the south. For other activists, the overriding concern is the government’s ethnic-cleansing campaign against southern peoples such as the Dinka. Late last year the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum joined the fight, declaring through its “committee on conscience” that Khartoum’s atrocities against the southerners warranted an unprecedented “genocide warning.”
The Bush administration is clearly headed toward deeper involvement in Sudan. A week after seeing Wolf’s video, Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke to the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “There is perhaps no greater tragedy on the face of the earth today than the tragedy that is unfolding in the Sudan,” he said. Last week Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice met with Powell and agreed that Sudan will be one of their foreign-policy priorities.
What they are going to do about it is another question. The most cogent plan to date was offered in March by the congressionally chartered Commission on International Religious Freedom. The panel urged appointment of a special presidential Sudan envoy, deliveries of “nonlethal” aid to rebel areas, diplomatic pressure on Khartoum to stop bombing civilian targets and a tightening of economic sanctions. The administration is still talking ambiguously about seeking a “just peace” in Sudan and the need to address issues like slavery and alleged genocide. The people of southern Sudan can only hope that Washington’s help will not end with those vague promises.
